I would say go for it. Hadoop is becoming more of a norm in industry and I can tell you from personal experience that having prior hands-on Hadoop work makes your resume pop a little more.
Even better is if you're able to muck around in core Hadoop versus abstracted management layers like Cloudera. The things you have to learn in maintaining a Hadoop cluster like cloud systems management, tuning, running jobs, etc. makes for valuable experience, even if niche.
Re:Bored in grad school? Learn Hadoop
by daviddumenil on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @05:13PM
(#3950509)
Definitely the right direction:
http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/hadoop.do
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/255142/idc_exp...
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and...
Although I'd second the point that getting your hands dirty with the Hadoop core is likely more valuable than straight sysadmin work.
Re:Bored in grad school? Learn Hadoop
by throwaway1979 on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @03:00PM
(#3949991)
I don't see exploding demand in this. However, the experience will likely translate over to other domains and make you better for it. I'm not a sys admin but setup a small hadoop cluster ... but wow ... talk about learning experiences!
I'm fortunate enough to be up for two systems positions with companies in my area, and one of them is part of a group maintaining a Hadoop cluster. I've never maintained Hadoop infrastructure before so I'm wondering if it's worth the "career capital" investment. There don't appear to be too many openings that I know of for Hadoop Sys admins, and while I don't expect to lose any skills working on it, I wonder if this platform is realistically expected to grow, and maybe become something I could maybe build a valuable niche set of skills for...
Any help would be appreciated...